College develops adjunct faculty pool, potentially saving millions

When leaders at Tarrant County College (TCC) in Fort Worth, Texas, realized their adjunct faculty members were essentially taking on the role of full-time faculty, they knew they needed to make changes to avoid noncompliance penalties.

“When we looked at our adjunct faculty in terms of what they’ve historically done, I would say they might qualify for benefits,” said Ricardo Coronado, Ph.D., associate vice chancellor for human resources at the college. “We wanted to make sure we were following our own policies, in addition to following the federal requirements, to make sure benefits are appropriate for that category of employee.”

They quickly took action. “We had to limit the number of hours and the number of courses our adjunct faculty worked,” Ricardo said. “But that created demand for other adjunct faculty.”

To meet the increased demand, the recruitment team at TCC partnered with PeopleAdmin and other departments within the college to create a pool of 125 adjunct faculty members.

“We started by screening applicants using Hire,” Ricardo said. “That allowed us to identify qualified candidates who applied within the last year.”

From there, it was a matter of reaching out. “We went back and sent out emails with Hire, gauging former candidates’ interest and inviting them to come back and apply,” Ricardo said.

Once they established which applicants shared a mutual interest, they put together an on-campus event. “We held a recruitment fair,” Ricardo said. “And we’ve been able to narrow down the recruitment fair to an interview fair.”

The events were a resounding success.

“At the beginning, we decided how many positions we needed to fill for each department,” Ricardo said. “In many areas we exceeded our goal, but there was never an area where we didn’t meet it.”

The successful project highlighted many of the recent enhancements to PeopleAdmin’s solutions. “We’ve been using Hire for eight or nine years. The evolution has really excelled in the last year and a half, leading to some great advancements,” Ricardo said. “Today Hire is cutting-edge.”

The project also strengthened Ricardo’s faith in PeopleAdmin as a partner. “The team at PeopleAdmin would ask questions, make suggestions, and even go into the system to make changes for us. They were very responsive.

“A lot of vendors claim to be focused on higher education in their marketing, but they’re not going to take the in-depth look into the metrics and analytics that PeopleAdmin does,” Ricardo added. “We really appreciated the expertise they brought to the table.”

PeopleAdmin recognized Tarrant County College with a “Make it Happen” award in 2016, in recognition of the institution’s creative solution to adjunct faculty challenges. The award is one of five presented at PeopleAdmin’s annual customer conference, PeopleConnect.